F4LL0UT: Excuse me, you didn't say astrology, you said psychology and anthropology. My cousin studied psychology and is a criminal profiler now, my father worked as an anthropologist and studied the beliefs of minorities in Poland including some beliefs and customs which were not documented before his work, especially not with that amount of detail, and my brother wrote an anthropological thesis about Russia and the Soviet Union which provides the kind of information that say western politicians and their advisers and all those "experts" obviously lack when it comes to relations with Russia. You really dare saying that this kind of work is an insult to "actual scientists"?
hedwards: None of those are scientific pursuits. I don't care how many people you know who engage in those studies, they are still not science.
Personally, I think the insinuation that those are scientific pursuits to be both insulting as well as deeply disturbing. While we're at it, why don't we declare economists and tea leaf readers to be scientists? Or perhaps we shouldn't be leaving out the palm readers and tarot card experts.
The fact here is that the scientific method is thoroughly understood and it's a pain in the ass to follow the requirements. There's a reason why they call the hard sciences "hard" sciences it's because they're difficult as well as being focused on concrete reality.
Which is demonstrably not the case with any of those fields. I'm not even sure why anthropologists would feel entitled to use the term scientist when historians don't. In neither case are you ever going to reach a concrete conclusion based upon the scientific method. You're at best going to accurately describe what already exists.
my oh my. I do wonder what paradigm you belong to... So you are saying that natural science are 'real' sciences and social sciences are not? I guess whether you can easily make your results into a graph or not is an important yardstick.
You may likewise say that "at best going to accurately describe what already exists" - also applies to 'hard' science. Creating a working mathematical model of magnetism, or a showing of how electrons changes position in H2O from water to ice, is nothing but doing so.
'Hard' and 'Soft' sciences are both Columbie eggs, though since social sciences are closer to everyday experiences it just seems more so.
This is just a matter of perception, more than anything else. having an understanding of how humans work, I would argue, is just as important as understanding how physics work.
http://www.columbia.edu/cu/21stC/issue-1.1/soft.htm [url=http://bama.ua.edu/~sprentic/607%20Diamond%201987.htm]http://bama.ua.edu/~sprentic/607%20Diamond%201987.htm[/url]
edit - to put some light on it - I am educated as a chemist, and I am now doing a doctorate in education, so I have afoot in both 'hard' and 'soft' sciences. Neither is less or more rigours than the other, just different ways of thinking.